


When it Comes to You

by thejilyship



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, fem!James - Freeform, fem!Jily, jily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thejilyship/pseuds/thejilyship
Summary: Jamie and Lily haven't been getting along recently. Now they're stuck doing rounds.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, fem!james potter/lily evans
Comments: 11
Kudos: 38
Collections: Fem! Jily





	When it Comes to You

They argue all the time now.

When Lily complains to Mary about this, while Jamie is out with her friends so there’s no chance of her overhearing, Mary reminds her that they have always argued. That there has never been a time where they knew one another and didn’t argue. 

Lily doesn’t know how to explain to Mary that it’s different now. 

That if she sits next to Jamie at breakfast and accidentally bumps her arm against Jamie’s arm, then the incident will spiral into a heated argument about the importance of personal space and Lily listing out the top ten reasons she’s never sitting next to Jamie again. 

Only Lily doesn’t have a list of any reasons to never sit next to Jamie again, and she leaves the table feeling frustrated and a little sad that she can’t even enjoy breakfast with her friend anymore. 

If they are partnered together in class, if they have to do patrols together, if they run into one another in the owlery, it doesn’t seem to matter what they’re doing or where they are, they will find a way to be at each other’s throats and it’s not fun like it used to be. It’s not playful, it’s not entertaining, Lily no longer seeks out these interactions. She avoids them, and so she’s taken to avoiding Jamie as well, since she can’t seem to have one without the other. 

And fighting with Jamie like this, it just hurts.

Mary just laughs at her when she tells her that she’s no longer speaking to Jamie. Wishes her luck and flicks her on the tip of her nose. 

They are roommates, so avoiding her entirely is quite the task.

Lily still resents getting flicked.

She’s head girl, so it should be easy to avoid doing rounds with Jamie. But one night when she’s meant to patrol with Remus, Jamie showed up instead. 

“No,” Lily said, narrowing her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest. “No, I’m not patrolling with you.” 

“Then you’re patrolling by yourself.” Jamie was glaring at her, like Lily was the reason that Jamie had been such a pain in the ass lately. “Remus isn’t feeling well, and he asked me to cover for him. I didn’t know that he was set to patrol with you or I would have told him to ask someone else.” 

Lily frowned. 

She didn’t want to patrol with Jamie. But she couldn’t patrol by herself, not after what Wilkes and Mulcieber did to that Ravenclaw boy last week. 

And Jamie knew that. Lily wanted to believe that even if they had been sleeping facing opposite directions simply to spite one another, Jamie wouldn’t leave her to patrol the corridors alone. (At least, Lily was facing the opposite direction. They both slept with their canopy pulled entirely shut, so there was no way for Lily to be certain that Jamie was facing away from her, but she had a feeling.)

They stood across from one another outside of the Gryffindor common room, silently glowering until the portrait opened and a fourth year walked out, saw the two of them and quickly muttered something about having left their book in the library. 

Lily waved them off and then sighed. 

“Alright, fine. Let’s just get this over with.”

“I love and appreciate the enthusiasm, Evans.”

“Spending time with people who openly can’t stand me is one of my favorite things to do. Especially people who were my friend up until a couple of weeks ago.”

Jamie tilted her head back and forth with a mocking look on her face and Lily clicked her tongue.

“What did I even do? Why have you been so angry with me?”

Jamie crossed her arms over her chest and huffed.

Lily ground her teeth together and clenched her fists. Fine. They didn’t have to talk.

They remained silent until they reached the next corridor.

“You’re the one who’s angry.” Jamie muttered.

“Me?” Lily answered immediately, as though they hadn’t walked in silence for two and a half minutes. “It seems like everything I do bothers you! You threw a pair of my shoes out the window yesterday because they were on ‘your side of the room!’”

Jamie shrugged. “Mary accio-ed them back.”

“You still threw them out the window!”

“Okay, well you charmed all of my robes lime green! Slughorn gave me detention for that!”

“Because you spilled ink all over my history essay!”

“Well you wouldn’t look at me while I was talking to you!”

“Why can’t we get along anymore?” Lily shouted, startling a pair of Hufflepuffs as they rounded the corner.

“Get back to your dorm,” Jamie snapped at them, and they exchanged looks before hurrying off. “I don’t know.” She said this to Lily.

“Well I hate it!” Lily carded her hand through her hair. “Why aren’t we friends anymore?”

Jamie’s tense shoulders relaxed a bit, and her voice was quieter, “I don’t know.”

“That’s not good enough.” She looked over at Jamie, trying to catch her eye, trying to find something about the other girl that gave her some kind of hint as to what was really going on. “I hate being upset with you.”

“Well then stop.” Jamie said, purposefully unhelpful. She was trying to start another row. Lily was not going to have it.

“Fine.” She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment and then dropped her shoulders. “Fine.”

Jamie glanced over at her, cautious and disbelieving.

“Glad that was so easy for you.”

Lily knew how Jamie was when she was needling, when she was looking for a big reaction, and normally she fell for it. But this was the first time in a week that she’d allowed herself to be around Jamie without pretending that the other girl didn’t exist, and she wanted answers. So she wouldn’t be falling for any of Jamie’s taunts.

It had always been hard to be Jamie’s friend.

It had always meant keeping secrets and treading carefully, and while sometimes it had felt like it was all too much, like she was going to explode with the pressure her secret built up inside her heart and her head, most of the time, she just liked being around Jamie. She liked making her smile and talking about classes and doing their homework together. She liked helping Jamie with her hair and teasing her about how her socks never matched. She liked finding excuses to hug her, to sit closer to her in the Great Hall. She liked pretending to need help in Transfigurations so that Jamie would spend extra time explaining things to her. Coming up with reasons why she needed to borrow her jumpers.

Once she pretended to be out of shampoo just so she could ask Jamie if she could borrow hers. She’d spent the entire day distracted.

It had taken Lily an embarrassing amount of time to work out what all of that meant.

It hadn’t been until the end of sixth year when Lily realized that she most certainly fancied Jamie Potter.

And now, two months into their seventh year, Lily was sort of terrified that she was losing her friend before she mustered up the nerve to tell her the truth.

She didn’t want to lose Jamie.

“It’s not easy. Nothing is ever easy when it comes to you.” Lily said. “But you’re my friend and there is clearly something going on. So, until you tell me what it is, I’m not going to shout at you or retaliate anymore. I’m tired of this.”

“Sure. I’ll give that five minutes and you’ll be back to telling me how much you can’t stand me.”

“You’re not understanding this, Jamie.” Lily huffed. “I can’t stand how things are between us right now. I can’t stand that I can’t talk to you like I used to. I can’t stand that you never look at me anymore. I can’t stand a lot of things about this situation that we’ve created, but you? No.” She shook her head, looking back at Jamie.

Her face was al scrunched up and her knuckles were white. She dropped her arms from over her chest and shoved them into the pockets of her cloak.

Lily waited. They made it down two more corridors and Jamie still hadn’t said anything.

“Jamie,” Lily said almost afraid now. Was it too late? Had she accidentally did something that had made Jamie upset with her without realizing it? Had she somehow started all of this.

Jamie swiped at her cheek and turned her head away.

Lily reached out and stopped them both in the middle of the corridor. “Why are you crying?” She asked, not sure if she’d ever seen Jamie cry before. Her worry bubbled up her throat.

“I’m not,” Jamie said quickly, but she was.

“Tell me what’s wrong. Please.”

Jamie reached up and grabbed a fistful of her own hair. Then she threw her hands in the air and huffed, “I’m gay, Lily.”

Lily stared at her blankly, but when she didn’t continue, Lily nodded. “Yes. I know that. You told me when we were fourteen. You told everyone when we were fourteen. You asked McGonagall if she could make an exception to the dress code so that you could where rainbow socks over your tights. You told Mary and I that you wanted to marry that chaser from the Harpies-”

“I know that you know!” Jamie interrupted. “And I know that we’re friends, and I know that I’ve been a bit of a dick recently, and I know that you’re overly affectionate with all your friends-“

“What are you going on about?” Lily was so confused by the sudden turn in their conversation that she was no longer worried that Jamie didn’t want to be her friend anymore.

“You’re always hugging people! Me, Mary, Remus, Marlene, Alice, Frank- your friends! You hug your friends. And you compliment them all the time, especially Mary, which is fine!” Jamie put her hands up, palms facing Lily who still didn’t have a damn clue what she was going on about. “You’re exceedingly kind and wonderful and all that.”

“Then why have you been fighting with me for the last month! Why have you been acting like you want nothing to do with me?”

“Because it got too hard! I was just trying to put up some boundaries, for my own sake, and then it got a little out of hand.” Jamie’s hands were back in her hair now. “I didn’t mean for things to go this far. I don’t want to be fighting with you all the time, I just… I don’t know what to do.”

Lily chewed on her lip. Lily had, in all likelihood, been quite obvious about how she felt about Jamie, perhaps Jamie had noticed. “Was I making you uncomfortable?”

“No.” Jamie answered quickly, looking up and down the hall. “Of course, you weren’t.”

“Then what boundaries were you trying to set?”

Jamie opened and shut her mouth a few times before she looked Lily in the eye and just huffed in frustration. She smiled at her, though even that looked frustrated. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“You didn’t mean for what to happen?” Lily was going to shake her if she didn’t spit it out. Jamie covered her face with her hands and Lily reached out and grabbed her wrists, pulling her hands down. “Come on, Jamie. We’re so close. Just tell me what happened.”

Jamie took a deep breath, looking down at their hands and then brought her gaze up to meet Lily’s.

“If I did something or said something that made you uncomfortable, just tell me so that I can never do it again. I want to go back to being able to smile at you when you walk in a room instead of feeling like I need to leave immediately.”

The corner of Jamie’s mouth quirked, but then fell back down. “Please don’t smile at me anymore.”

Lily narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Lily, I fancy you. I tried to stop, I didn’t mean to start, but I fancy you and sometimes being your friend is hard.” Lily tightened her grip on Jamie’s wrists and felt as though she’d been frozen. “I don’t mean for it to be hard, and I know that that’s something I have to figure out, clearly in a different way because I’ve mucked everything up recently.”

“Jamie,”

“I know. And like I said, this is for me to work through, I’m not expecting-“

“Jamie shut up.” Lily let go of her wrists and took a small step back.

“Rude.” But she stopped rattling on.

“Do you mean that? Do you really fancy me?”

Jamie ran her hand through her hair and nodded. “Yes. I do.”

Lily felt laughter pushing through her and she spun around as it erupted, her face splitting into a giant grin. She steadied herself and put her hands on Jamie’s shoulders. 

“Did I break you?” Jamie asked, narrowing her brow.

“Maybe,” Lily stepped closer to her, this time so the tips of their shoes were touching. “I have felt like you’ve broken me so many times in the last couple of years.” Jamie seemed to be the frozen one now as Lily leaned forward until their foreheads were resting against one another. “The next time you tell me that you fancy me, can you do it so that it doesn’t sound like an apology?”

Jamie’s eyes were searching her face and Lily slowly brought her hands up from Jamie’s shoulder to cup her face, to brush her thumbs over her cheeks. Jamie’s eyes fluttered closed and then she strained against Lily’s hold until their lips connected.

It was a short kiss, but sweet and full of hopeful disbelief. 

“I fancy you, too,” Lily said, her hand pushing through Jamie’s curls.

“Yeah,” Jamie said against her lips, Lily could feel the start of her smile, “I haven’t seen you kiss any of your friends like this before.” Overly affectionate with all your friends. Lily laughed quietly.

“Not like this,” Lily agreed.

The tension that had built up between them over the last month melted away further with every kiss, until Lily felt completely pliable in Jamie’s arms.

When they pulled back, when they had finished smiling dumbly at one another, when they had remembered that they were supposed to be doing rounds and restarted, holding hands this time, Jamie let out a low hum. “I guess I owe Sirius five galleons.”

Lily started laughing. 

And Jamie made sure she kept laughing for the rest of rounds.


End file.
